Scorpion Exhausts case study: a B2B trade portal wired into Orderwise

Every dealer order arrived by phone or email and was re-keyed into Orderwise. It was labour-intensive and open to human error, which mattered to a company that trades on its customer service.

Dealers needed to see live stock, due dates and their own pricing before they committed, and all of that lived inside Orderwise. Anything shown on the website had to come from the ERP, not a copy of it.

The IT manager, Tom Brentnall, had already designed how the products section should look and needed a partner to build the eCommerce and integration side rather than the visual design. Invoices also had to keep the format existing customers were used to.

We built the portal on OpenCart and integrated it with Orderwise both ways. Web orders are placed automatically into Orderwise; stock levels, due dates and prices flow back out to the site, so a dealer sees exactly what the trade counter would tell them.

The bulk of the work was in the data: multiple customer groups, pre-processed dealer pricing per group, grouped product components and a sync that keeps every part of it consistent. That is the difference between a trade site that gets used and one that gets bypassed for the phone.

We rewrote the OpenCart invoice system so invoices kept their familiar style, and surfaced telephone orders on the website so dealers have one order history whichever way they bought. Scorpion reported a steep rise in sales after the new ordering system went live.